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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31401 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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My take on it is that punishment should more be based on what is best for the rest of us. Do we want to live next to this person? Is this person a massive risk for the rest of us and a drag on society? My main argument for the death penalty is that we are far better off without these people. They high risk.

To commit such extreme crimes they most likely have an outlier awful personality with high levels of psychopathy, poor impulse control and low IQ. They are pretty much the extreme left tail of the bell curve. We are simply better off without them. Also getting rid of these people is a eugenic measure that is highly effective as we would be removing the people with the worst possible traits.

Yes, but not unlike the problem of schools (nobody cared when dumb kids were dumb when everyone was white, but thanks to Multiculturalism if too many dumb kids are non-white you need to stop teaching algebra or calculus to anyone, and abolish standardized testing, and remove all discipline) we now have a problem with the death penalty, or even imprisoning anyone. When the country was majority white, I'm not sure anyone really cared if people who obviously murdered someone were put to death. I'm not sure anyone cared if a bunch of poor whites from the same zipcode were always getting thrown in jail. Add a dash of Multiculturalism however, and suddenly we aren't allowed to have a functional civilization anymore. To many non-whites end up in jail or get the death penalty? Time to start depolicing and just letting people go. Sure they might murder someone you love a week later, but at least we won't be racist.

What are you talking about?

Multicultural America is the only majority white country left that has the death penalty.

When England permanently put a moratorium on executions, it was 90% white British.

The US movement to abolish the death penalty goes back to the 18th century, when multicultural considerations weren't a thing. I will leave this link to Perplexity's quick summary that has further links.

You are correct that currently people are concerned with the death penalty in part because it affects black men more than white men. (And that nobody cares that it affects white men more then Asian men or black women, etc.)

Uh, do you understand the history of the death penalty in the USA? Until the very late 20th century, the death penalty was quite strongly associated with, and mostly used on, large black populations.

That’s not an argument against, but the death penalty being in heavy use against blacks has been going on for a long time, and recent shifts in demographic composition are not the reason many opponents tie it to civil rights.

When the country was majority white, I'm not sure anyone really cared if people who obviously murdered someone were put to death.

The SCOTUS-ordered moratorium on the death penalty was in place 1972-1976, at which time the US was still roughly 80% non-Hispanic white. European countries mostly abolished the death penalty back when they were still monoethnic. The other only other unquestionably first-world country to execute people on a regular basis is Singapore, which is rather notoriously not monoethnic.

So if anything, the empirical evidence points towards monoethnic countries being more abolitionist, not less.

Does China count as a first world country?

No. They are somewhere between Mexico and Thailand in GDP per capita, whether you use nominal or PPP.

They don't use it often, but Japan still has the death penalty, has executed 98 people in the last 25 years, and has done as recent as 2022. Taiwan restored the death penalty in 2010 and it enjoys substantial polling popularity.

The other only other unquestionably first-world country to execute people on a regular basis is Singapore, which is rather notoriously not monoethnic.

Japan and Taiwan both execute people often enough to qualify, no?

It's arguable. Taiwan has been executing slightly less than one person a year lately. Japan averages about three a year if you don't count the Aum Shinriyko sarin plotters - although they appear to be passing more death sentences than that given that Wikipedia says they have a backlog built up of 107 inmates on death row.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/states-landing

Looking through states that everyone agrees maintain the death penalty, there's lots of low-single digit numbers of annual executions and lots of 'carry out one execution every other year' type states. Like yes, they're much smaller than Taiwan or especially Japan, but Taiwan and Japan have much lower murder rates- and Japan in practice seems to use the death penalty for much the same things as retentionist US states. When you take that into account, a multiple murderer is possibly more likely to get the death penalty in Japan than in the US south.

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